


Flotsam

by aban_asaara



Series: Freakshow: John Hancock and Lizzy Oslow Hayes [1]
Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Body Image, Casual Sex, Dreams, Drinking, Drug Use, Drugged Sex, F/M, Goodneighbor (Fallout), Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Memories, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Relationship, Self-Harm, Sexual Content, Smoking, Suicidal Thoughts, Survivor Guilt, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, as in consensual but chemmed up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:26:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26792851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aban_asaara/pseuds/aban_asaara
Summary: Searching for her infant son, Lizzy washes up at the gates of Goodneighbour, where she soon catches the enigmatic mayor’s interest. Can she stay afloat or will the town’s countless temptations pull her under?
Relationships: Female Sole Survivor/Sole Survivor's Spouse, John Hancock/Female Sole Survivor
Series: Freakshow: John Hancock and Lizzy Oslow Hayes [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1953811
Comments: 38
Kudos: 55





	Flotsam

**Author's Note:**

> Fallout 4 was my hyperfixation of choice in the first few months of lockdown, and what was meant to be a quick little one-shot turned into this 20K exploration of how badly my Sole Survivor, Lizzy Oslow-Hayes, is keeping it together after she comes out of Vault 111.
> 
> I took some liberties with canon: Hancock and Lizzy’s relationship starts off as physical, and although they do develop romantic feelings for each other eventually, this fic really only covers the early beginnings. I also needed to make things harder for Lizzy, so information and caps are scarcer than they are in-game, and the timeline of the Silver Shroud TV show has been altered too.
> 
> I also somehow completely missed the fact that Sole and their spouse had canon occupations, so Lizzy was a musical actress before the bombs, and her Nate worked at Mass Fusion (and was in fact the nephew of CEO Karl Oslow -- yay nepotism!).
> 
> And on that note, onwards! <3

Widow, the compassionate trees bend in,  
The trees of loneliness, the trees of mourning.  
They stand like shadows about the green landscape —  
Or even like black holes cut out of it.  
A widow resembles them, a shadow-thing,  
  
Hand folding hand, and nothing in between.  
A bodiless soul could pass another soul  
In this clear air and never notice it —  
One soul pass through the other, frail as smoke  
And utterly ignorant of the way it took.  
  
That is the fear she has—the fear  
His soul may beat and be beating at her dull sense  
Like Blue Mary’s angel, dovelike against a pane  
Blinded to all but the grey, spiritless room  
It looks in on, and must go on looking in on.

— _Widow_ , Sylvia Plath

In the land of Gods and Monsters  
I was an Angel  
looking to get fucked hard

— _Gods and Monsters_ , Lana Del Rey

It’s a bad, bad idea.

Lizzy knows it the instant the memory lounger clicks shut: too much like her frozen coffin deep in the bowels of Vault 111, frost swirling across the glass like window panes on a late-autumn morning. Panic wells up her throat—“I’ve found something,” Doctor Amari says, her voice tinny through the plastic lid, “very recent”—but Lizzy never backs down, not since she was sixteen and chose the man she was going to marry among the boys of Shaw High. She sure as hell isn’t going to start now, not after telling Irma she could handle it.

She _can_ handle it.

The haze of anesthetics dims the screen before her eyes. She breathes the sharp, medical scent as Irma’s voice fades from her ears, and then Lizzy is back underground, metal and tubes and that pale, sickly light spilling from the rows of pods all around her.

It’s worse the second time around. Maybe because she knows what’s going to happen. Maybe because thanks to some quirk of the Memory Den or her own brain, she’s _outside_ the cryo-pod this time, but just as powerless. No voice to call for help, no hands to disarm the man about to kill her husband. (No scar on her face either, she can’t help but notice.) All she can do is watch herself sway heavy-lidded, fists beating feebly on the glass. The metallic echoes of the gunshot assault her ears again; crimson sprays bright and wet on the back of Nate’s pod, and then Shaun’s wails dwindle down that dark corridor.

That man’s face floats before her eyes again, one corner of his mouth slanting towards the scar running down his eye and cheek. Lizzy is screaming now, someplace out of time, incorporeal hands clawing at her husband’s murderer.

“Hold on,” Doctor Amari says, almost drowned out by the rush of blood pounding in Lizzy’s ears. “I’m pulling you out.”

Ten, nine, eight, seven—Lizzy breaches the surface of her own mind again, and the cold, sharp smell of the cryo-pod is replaced by the anesthetic and the strange, dusty scent that permeates the Memory Den. She tries to compose herself, but she’s still clutching at her throat and gasping for air by the time Irma and Amari bend over her through the dissipating anesthetic, all apologies and concerned looks.

“Easy there, easy,” Irma says, rubbing her shoulder comfortingly. “Oh, sweetheart, I am _so_ sorry for putting you through this again.”

Lizzy laughs, a shrill, breathless noise. “Well, you did warn me the first time could be traumatic,” she answers, though the strained sound of her voice undermines her attempt at levity. “Does that mean I can get to the fun stuff next time?”

She doesn’t miss the knowing glance Irma and Amari exchange. “I wouldn’t advise going back anytime soon, sweetheart,” Irma says with motherly condescension. “If I had any idea we were going to put you through that again, I would’ve said no in the first place.”

Irma offers her a refund; Lizzy thanks her, then wills her trembling mouth and shaking limbs to stillness before pulling herself out of the lounger. Her heart is still throbbing high up her throat, but at least Amari can’t tell now without monitoring her vitals on her terminal.

Lizzy flashes a bright, easy smile at the bald patron watching her from behind his sunglasses, and manages not to fall apart till she’s closed the door of the room she’s renting at the Hotel Rexford.

* * *

 _That’s a pretty face, doll_ , the raider says, his knife at her temple. _Think I’ll keep it_.

The point sinks into the meat of her cheek, and Lizzy wakes up gasping for air, her pulse hammering her breastbone. Her first few days out of the vault, waking meant a moment or two of reprieve, of hope, that it was all just a bad dream, that the world was still standing, that she’d roll over and find Nate asleep next to her, Shaun safe and sound in his crib, and her face unmarred in the bathroom mirror.

Now she doesn’t bother touching her face to make sure anymore. She knows the scar’s there, its raised, angry line splitting her face from temple to nose bridge.

Nate’s dead, and Shaun’s gone.

Lizzy forces herself to breathe in the damp of the Rexford till her pulse slows down again, but the nightmare has ruined any chance of falling back asleep anytime soon. She hauls herself out of bed, pulling her boots on even just to walk the few steps to the window, trying not to think about the sticky residue darkening the scuffed, creaky floorboards—or the discolorations on the peeling strips of wallpaper, or the dark stains on the bed, for that matter. Then she finds a crack between the planks boarding up the window, and looks outside.

Goodneighbour’s come alive while she slept. Night has fallen, and voices rise from the streets below, washed in red, flickering light. From her vantage point, she sees it all, humans and ghouls alike swaying drunkenly in the streets, a suspicious crate switching hands between two buildings, a couple fucking in an alley. This is what passes for civilization in 2287.

It should’ve been her.

The thought drops into her mind without warning. Nate would’ve known what to do. Nate would’ve pulled his weight and been able to find Shaun. Lizzy’s still as powerless now as she was in the vault. Hell, she’d be dead now if it weren’t for Codsworth, her face turned into some sort of gruesome raider trophy. No wonder. A face like hers is a relic of the past, she knows: a mere few days out of the vault and she acquired her first scar, lost clumps of hair by the handfuls after being caught unawares by what Preston called _radstorms_. She doesn’t belong here, in this new world overtaken by raiders and synths and ghouls.

 _And super mutants_ , she thinks. _Can’t forget the super mutants_.

After what she faced to make it to Goodneighbour, she can handle the town itself. She retrieves her combat knife and the tube of artisanal lipstick she found in a chem dealer’s stall, back in Diamond City. The texture is greasier than her Mary May, and the smell stings her nose, but the colour’s remarkably close to her signature red. She paints the shape of her Cupid’s bow in the reflection of the blade, trying not to think about what the hell she’s putting on her mouth.

She slides the knife into her boot, then cinches her belt. The wasteland has done more for her figure than her pre-war diet pills, and at this rate she’s going to have to poke a new hole in the strap soon. Cheap lipstick, and a wasp waist to make Claire Redelle jealous. Suppose there are _some_ upsides to the apocalypse.

Her laser pistol glints dully on the bedside table, the fusion cell a garish yellow hue even in the night; she straps it to her hip, combs her fingers through her hair, and leaves the hotel room. Outside, Lizzy keeps her head high and her strides confident. Everyone’s either too high or drunk to pay her much attention, but she still breathes a sigh of relief once she steps into the flickering neon light of the Third Rail and the stern sweep of the bouncer’s gaze. “Hancock says newcomers are welcome in the Third Rail,” Ham says, like he’d bar her way if it was up to him. “Go on in.”

Hancock again. The man’s got his fingerprints all over town, looks like.

Lizzy thanks him, earning herself a curt nod, then makes her way down the lifeless escalator. Patrons are clustered into the shadows pooling around the dilapidated train station, apparently dead intent on avoiding the direct light of the lanterns. A stage singer is crooning love songs by the bar, the red sequins of her dress shimmering with the languorous sway of her hips.

Whitechapel Charlie’s metal eyes gyrate towards her as she approaches the bar. “Wasting my time again or are you ordering this time?” he asks, grabbing a ratty dish towel with one clawed appendage.

Lizzy smiles, refusing to take the bait. “Here for a drink. A Gwinnett Pilsner, please. And a pack of cigarettes,” she adds on impulse.

Fuck it. She hasn’t smoked since she found out she was pregnant with Shaun, more than two centuries ago, so she counts her caps while Charlie fetches a bottle of beer. She shouldn’t be spending: she’s yet to find a job that doesn’t necessitate the extra gun she hoped to hire in the first place, and MacCready was still woefully out of her price range even after she got him to knock fifty caps off his rate. She’s fairly sure he’d have laughed her out of the VIP area if he obviously didn’t have so much on his mind.

“Here you go, guv,” Charlie says. A compartment in his chassis produces a flame, and she lights her cigarette before blowing a thin plume of smoke towards the ceiling. “Changed your mind about that job for the mayor, by any chance?”

She gives him a tight smile. “I promise you’ll be the first to know,” she replies, then makes her way to an unoccupied couch.

Two hundred years have done the beer no favours, and the cigarette isn’t much better. It’s dry and harsh on the throat, and the paper has a strange, oily sheen to it, but it’s one of the rare pleasures she’s experienced since unthawing, so she savours every puff. Lizzy closes her eyes. The singer’s voice washes over her, languid and sensual. The beer and the comforting familiarity of the cigarette in her hand dull the conversations and clink of glasses to a muffled hush, and for the first time since she emerged from the vault, she feels if not peace, then something resembling stillness.

“This seat taken?”

 _Oh, for Christ’s sake_ — “Mayor Hancock,” Lizzy blurts out in a startled cloud of smoke. “Hi.”

He towers over her, dark eyes glinting amidst the shadow cast by the brim of his tricorn hat. “Hey, you can say no,” he says, a lopsided smile stretching his mouth under the hole where his nose used to be. “Tete-a-tete with a ghoul ain’t everyone’s idea of a good time, I get that.”

She didn’t mean to stare, but prior to Goodneighbour she hadn’t yet met a ghoul who didn’t try to munch on her extremities, and combined with the getup, it’s hard not to. Recovering, Lizzy scoots over and gestures to the empty seat next to hers. “Well, you own the place, don’t you?” she says, a feeble attempt at humour.

Thankfully, he seems amused. “Damn right I do,” he says as he sits down next to her. “How do you like my little joint?”

He reaches into his frock coat, pulls out a pack of cigarettes, and flicks her a glance. Of course he had to be sitting on the side of the scar. Without her sunglasses to conceal the worst of it she can feel his eyes tracing its marred length, and resists the impulse to turn away.

Instead she crosses one leather-clad leg over the other—and _that_ gets his attention—and takes a long drag off her cigarette. “I like it,” Lizzy replies between two puffs. “Lovely entertainment.”

 _The fallout’s blowing through, but baby, it’s just you_ , sings Magnolia, winking at them from her makeshift stage. Hancock slips a joint between his lips, such as they are. “Yeah, Mags’s something,” he says over the click of his lighter. The glow of the flame spills between mangled, leathery fingers. “So, what takes you to Goodneighbour?” he asks in a cloud of smoke, training those strange dark eyes on her again. “Not every day a woman like you walks through the gate.”

She tilts her head to the side and gives him the coy, enigmatic smile that earned her so many free drinks in college. “Oh? And what’s a woman like me?”

It’s a poor attempt at deflection, and he doesn’t fall for it. “Someone’s fishing for compliments,” he teases, then blows out a couple of perfect smoke rings. “Goodneighbour’s where the flotsam washes up, but you ain’t got the look of a drifter. Fact is, you look like a woman on a mission.” When his eyes land on her again, she’s keenly aware that this is the man who stabbed someone to death right in front of her. “So, I’m curious as to what that mission is, vaultie.”

Busted. Lizzy tries to muster another smile, but the corners of her mouth falter. “It’s a long story,” she answers, butting her cigarette in the ashtray, “and nowhere near as interesting as it might appear, I’m afraid.”

He shrugs. “Try me. I got time to kill.”

She takes a long, tasteless slug of beer, then fishes another smoke out of her pack. Hancock flicks his lighter open at that, and as she leans closer to light her cigarette, their gazes meet over the flame flickering inside the cup of his hand. Irma and Amari were there for the ride when she revisited her memories of the vault, and she suspects nothing stays secret to the mayor for long within the walls of Goodneighbour. Better share the story on her own terms.

So, she tells him. She tells him everything: the bombs, Vault 111, the cryogenic experiment. Waking up just in time to see her husband murdered and her son kidnapped, the rows upon rows of cryo-pods turned coffins, the metallic chatter of her teeth echoing in the maze of empty hallways.

Emerging from the vault to see the sun for the first time in more than two hundred years, and find her entire existence turned to rubble.

And against all odds, Hancock listens. _Really_ listens. He doesn’t interrupt, doesn’t rush her, doesn’t get the thousand-yard stare of someone simply humouring her. His jaw works under the wreck of his skin when she talks about Vault-Tec, and a bitter smile twists his mouth when she mentions how the mayor of Diamond City would’ve let her fend for herself had a local reporter not forced his hand.

She hasn’t even told Preston all this. Blame the beer, or the lack of sleep. The only thing she leaves out is the raider and his knife, now tucked in her boot. Too shameful, too intimate, somehow, and it’s not like she has anything new to teach Hancock about the depravities of raiders anyway. But she can’t stop herself once she starts, and when she gets to the end of her story—finally making it inside Diamond City’s green wall only to learn the detective she intended to hire to find her missing son has _also_ gone missing—something far worse than words threatens to come out of her, and she realizes she’s on the verge of tears.

Lizzy takes a long drag off her neglected cigarette, then breathes out the smoke slowly, slowly, till the pale volute has stopped shivering.

“The guy who took your kid, what’d he look like?” Hancock asks, his voice gentle despite the rasp of it.

She clears the haze out of her throat. “Bald head, scar across his left eye,” she answers, tracing a line down her face with one finger.

He casually fishes a tablet from a tin of Mentats and pops it into his mouth; he rubs one hand across his mouth as he thinks, then finally shakes his head. “Haven’t seen ‘im around, but lotsa people drift through Goodneighbour. I can ask around, see if anyone’s heard of him or where Valentine’s at.”

“Thanks,” she says, and means it.

“And hey, you need caps or an extra gun, I can hook you up.”

Someone to watch her back. The mere thought is enough to send relief flooding through her chest in anticipation. Instead she surprises herself by laughing, suddenly aware of just who she’s shared her story to. Confiding in a cold-blooded killer is one thing; owing him favours, quite another. “I appreciate it,” she replies, as pleasantly as she can, “but I’ll manage.”

A cloud of smoke escapes the hole of his nose. “You change your mind, you just let me know, all right?” He nods towards her bottle of pilsner. “Another beer?”

She makes a face. “Oh, god, no, thank you. Not if you paid me.”

Hancock laughs. “Can’t blame ya. Always more of a vodka man myself.” He looks at her then, the smouldering end of his joint burning in miniature in the black of his eyes. “Something with a little more … _kick_ , then?”

Chems, of course. She’s not so new to this new world she doesn’t know what he means. Her heartbeat picks up, slamming against her breastbone. Those strange inhuman eyes are a palpable weight on her, and she’s very aware of the sharp scent of the curls of smoke swaying between them, the texture of the couch’s foamy stuffing spilling out of a slash under her fingers, the fragments of conversation threaded through the silky undulations of Magnolia’s voice. She shouldn’t be here in the Third Rail, much less spilling her guts to the mayor of Goodneighbour and considering whatever he’s offering her, but even knowing she should be afraid she _isn’t_ , and when she opens her mouth to answer something wild and defiant speaks in her stead.

“I might be,” she says, glancing at him through her lashes. “What did you have in mind?”

He quirks one corner of his mouth, then inserts the joint between his teeth and motions her closer. Lizzy leans towards him, her heart pounding so hard she’s certain he can hear the drumming beat of it between her parted lips. Their mouths almost touch but don’t. She keeps her eyes wide open, staring at Hancock staring back at her as he blows a thin, hot trail of smoke between her lips. The scraping heat of it fills her lungs, and Lizzy holds onto it for a few seconds before breathing it out slowly.

“Hope things work out for ya,” Hancock says into the dissipating haze, then butts his joint in the ashtray before leaving the Third Rail.

* * *

“Back again already, sweetheart?” Irma says when Lizzy steps into the red parlour of the Memory Den. “I thought we’d agreed sending you back just yet wasn’t the best idea.”

Amari’s in agreement, judging by the pinched line of her mouth above her monitor. Lizzy gives her a sweet, close-lipped smile, then casts a contrite glance in Irma’s direction. “I know what to expect now, and I think I can handle it. And if it turns out I can’t,” she continues before Irma can make the suggestion herself, “then I won’t bother you again, I swear.”

She wants to see Nate again, she knows this much. She woke up late at the Rexford, her lips still stained with lipstick and her hair reeking of cigarette smoke, her mind muzzy with the remnants of a dream: she was the one standing on the stage of the Third Rail, her red dress shimmering like fish scales under the light of a lone projector, and as she sang about the end of the world, all she could see of her audience was the burning ember of his cigarette tracing slow paths in the dark. Waking wasn’t enough to dispel the feeling of loneliness pervading the dream, so she spent the better part of the afternoon in bed, smoking and forcing herself to look straight through the grief at her memories in all their minute, technicolour detail.

So here she is now, back at the Memory Den, clutching to herself every detail she’s been able to dredge up from the memory of her wedding day.

This better work.

“Very well,” Irma relents with a sigh, gesturing to one of the empty loungers. “But it’s not refundable this time.”

Lizzy thanks her, then lies back in the pod. Her heartbeat picks up again when the lid clicks shut, but she keeps Vault 111 at bay by clinging to that balmy June evening instead, the garden washed in rose gold, the guests dressed to the nines, Nate’s arm wrapped tight around her waist—

And then she’s _there_ , everything in sharp, brilliant focus, and oh, how much she’d forgotten: the air heady with perfume and the fragrance of the nearby rose bushes, the strings of lanterns festooning the low tree branches, the candles in their glass holders and their reflection on the ivory satin of her dress. She can’t help the pang of jealousy as she watches the memory of herself dancing in a distant cousin’s arms, her cheeks rosy and her dark curls pinned in a careful chignon, a smile fit for the big screen lighting up her unscarred face. And it’s not just the scar: just a few months in the wasteland have already dulled her beauty in subtle ways, muted the sheen of her hair and given her skin a perpetually ashen cast.

Well, at least she’s alive. That has to count for something.

It hits her like a wave, hard enough to jolt the breath out of her lungs. All of this is gone. All of _them_ are gone, not just Nate and Shaun. She knew it, of course, but seeing everyone she’s ever known gathered in one place brings it home in startling relief: the grandparents, the aunts, the high school friends, every smiling, laughing face in her memory is another person she’s lost.

The grief cuts deep enough to draw tears, but if she’s crying in her memory lounger, some two hundred years in the future, she has no way to know. Not even the slightest blur to warp the scene before her eyes; it remains defyingly crisp as she watches Nate’s friends laughing and slapping his shoulders, their parents deep in conversation at the head table, and herself, pressing kisses to her cousin’s cheeks as the song crests to a close. The wedding singer counts to three. The band launches into the next number, and another man approaches, his arm stretched out towards her.

Andy.

“Miss Adelaide,” he says, the role she played when they first met. Lizzy watches as surprise widens her own eyes, but she accepts his arm, twines her hand to his, and together they start spinning in slow circles across the grass. “Married the man today,” he continues, quoting one of her numbers’ lyrics.

She laughs, her eyes sweeping the garden to find Nate, who winks at her and lifts his glass. “So I have. Though thankfully I won’t have to change his ways,” she replies, reprising the lyrics of the same song.

He laughs, a soft, subdued thing. “Heard he’s done well for himself,” he replies with a quick glance in Nate’s direction. “Engineering manager at Mass Fusion.”

“I know,” she says, beaming with pride. “And I’m so very lucky he’s willing to support my acting.”

Andy’s gaze traces the curve of her bare shoulder, flicks to the pearl dangling from her earlobe, then to her scarlet mouth, and back to her eyes. “He’s the lucky one, if you ask me,” he says, his voice barely more than a whisper.

They dance in silence after that, his hand steady on the small of her back, the night air between them heavy with unspoken things and the fragrance of roses. The months and years have piled up like dust over the memory of that conversation; Lizzy hasn’t thought about it in literal centuries, but watching his eyes resting on her upturned face, she remembers rehearsals, smiles and jests traded over his piano, celebratory drinks shared at the bar across the street.

And one evening in particular, when somehow they’d been the last to leave the theatre and he’d sung to her in his rich, velvety voice, and the diamond ring on her finger had weighed a ton.

Andy draws her to his chest, his hold tight, almost desperate. She can smell the clean, woodsy scent of his cologne, and feel the warmth of his body through the pinstriped wool of his suit. He takes a sharp inhale, then whispers in her ear, “I’d have made you happy.”

It’s too late for doubt, or regret. Andy is dead, and so’s Nate and everyone else, and whatever choices and mistakes she made stopped mattering when the bombs fell. But she wonders all the same, and allows herself a small glimpse of what could’ve been, of a tiny apartment in downtown Boston full of music and laughter, cluttered with scripts and sheets of music and a grand piano that wouldn’t fit inside till they took the doors off their hinges, worlds away from her pristine house in Sanctuary Hills.

She loved Nate. Still does, if loving a dead man is possible. Nate had been the first, and only, her whole life: they shared their first kiss at the drive-in after school, lost their virginity to each other on the backseat of his Corvega, got engaged on a Friday afternoon, spent ice-skating hand in hand at the Common.

Shaun’s birth, a new beginning.

Lizzy had it all planned out, even more perfect than the pictures. They’d grow old together and die in their sleep, the way it’s supposed to. Not this, with her widowed at twenty-five, alone on the wrong side of the apocalypse. And that crack, that tear running right down the middle of her celluloid dreams, makes it hard to ignore any longer all the other impurities on the lens of her mind: the fights, the late evenings spent alone, the miles separating their respective sides of the bed.

 _If you’d been with Andy, you’d be dead too_ , a small voice whispers in the back of her mind. And maybe that’s how it should’ve been. No wasteland, no raiders, no radstorms.

No Shaun.

Her chest clenches with guilt. Nothing she can do for her baby till she’s acquired more caps or information, though, so she stamps the feeling down. She’s stuck here now, in the future, and with the Memory Den her only way back to the past, maybe she should make the most of her circumstances.

The tower of the Old State House guides her steps.

“I’m telling you, she’s up to something,” a woman says, and Lizzy stops in the doorway of Hancock’s office.

Well, _“_ office” might be too generous a word. Whatever passes for mayoral duties in Goodneighbour evidently involves very little paperwork: instead the coffee table is strewn with shotgun shells, holotapes, and enough chems to keep a drugstore supplied for a month or two.

From the doorway, Lizzy can only see the back of Hancock’s tricorn as he leans back against the couch. “Ain’t she always,” he sighs.

Fahrenheit glances up from the pistol she’s been cleaning and pushes a sheaf of red hair out of her face. A streak of gun oil shines across her forehead. “I mean something big, Hancock. She’s been _too_ quiet lately.” A wicked grin stretches her mouth. “Want me to send her a message?”

He stretches and laces his fingers behind the nape of his neck. “Nah. Finn was the message.”

“See, I think she got confused as to what that meant.”

“S’fine. Let her dig herself into a hole. We’ll just bury her there.”

Fahrenheit snorts, then puts the gun back together with practiced ease. She holds it in front of her as if to test the grip, spots Lizzy, and smiles. For one terrifying second Lizzy thinks Fahrenheit’s going to pull the trigger, but she returns the gun to its holster. “You got a visitor.”

Hancock throws a glance above his shoulder and grins. “Look who’s here,” he says, pulling himself to his feet. “No news yet, but I got my ear to the ground. What’s left of it, anyway,” he adds, chuckling. “Unless there’s something else?”

Lizzy’s pulse is running. She considers blurting an apology and turning back around, maybe returning to the Third Rail to find another lonely soul among the rabble there. But she’s seen the way Hancock looks at her. She remembers the heat and smoke between their mouths, and she knows there’s fire burning under that mangled skin of his.

She wets her lips, then takes a breath and a step forward. “As a matter of fact, yes,” she answers, flicking a coy glance in his direction.

His eyes sight in on her like a rifle. Fahrenheit’s already on her feet. “You got it, boss,” she says before he even needs to dismiss her. She shoots Lizzy an appraising look on her way out, then closes the set of double doors behind herself. The sound of her brief conversation with the watchman dwindles on the other side, and then Lizzy is alone with Hancock.

He leans back against the desk. “So. Back for more?”

The setting sun streams through the boarded-up windows to streak the red of his frock coat. Odds are she’ll be just another night he didn’t have to spend alone, and that suits her just fine. She wants—she wants to be wanted, ephemeral as it is. If she’s going to lose her nerve, she needs to know now, so she looks at him openly, not even trying to be polite about it, but the only stirring she feels is too low, too warm for revulsion.

A hundred movie lines crowd her mouth, spoken by silver screen vixens and temptresses. She takes her time closing the distance between them, very conscious of his eyes on the sway of her lips, and chooses the words that will inevitably stoke the black embers of his gaze to flame.

Instead, what comes out of her mouth is, “What do you remember from before the war?”

Hancock raises an eyebrow, or would, if he had any. “Oh, uh. Wasn’t actually around before the war,” he says, his tone vaguely apologetic, then blinks. “Damn, do I look _that_ rough?”

“Sorry,” Lizzy blurts out, horror dawning on her. “I thought—I mean—I didn’t—”

He laughs. “Relax, I’m just messing with ya. We can’t all be as well preserved as you,” he adds with a wink.

“I thought all ghouls were turned as a result of the bombings,” she tries.

“Most of us, yeah, but I never liked going about things the obvious way,” he answers, shrugging. “Nah, I owe my rugged good looks to this experimental radiation drug I took some years back. Hell of a high, and near immortality in the bargain? Not a bad deal if you ask me.”

“Wow,” she says, at a loss for anything else. She reaches for the scar on her face before she can stop the movement, and skims the back of the couch with one fingertip instead. “You’re one hell of a risk taker, Hancock.”

The slant of his mouth stretches. “You and me both, from the look of it.”

She crosses the few steps still separating them, letting the flirtatious smile play on her lips. “I haven’t tried much in the way of chems, I admit, except maybe the occasional Mentat back in college.” And the Slim-R, but she keeps that one to herself.

Hancock presses one hand to his chest. “A woman after my own heart. You ever feel like changing that, you let me know.” He looks at her, and she has no idea how she can even tell, but something in his eyes softens. “And hey, if you want to reminisce about the before times, you should see Kent Connolly at the Memory Den. Sure he’d appreciate it.”

His voice is kinder than she’d have ever expected from him, and the back of her eyes prickle at the realization. She’s not so naive not to suspect he might be playing some sort of long game with her, but it’s the closest thing she’s experienced to comfort in more than two centuries. Preston was still reeling from his own losses, Piper saw in her nothing more than a headline, and just when she thought she’d found her knight in power armour, Paladin Danse thrust a gun into her hands and started barking orders instead. She needed this, more than she knew.

Lizzy clears the haze out of her throat and smiles. “I will. Thanks,” she says, then closes the distance between them. He watches her, and she can see those dark flames in his eyes again. “But in the meantime …” Trailing off, she lets one fingertip brush the gold embroidery swirling around the buttonholes of his vest. “I’m here now,” she finishes in a whisper.

He brushes her cheek with the knuckles of one hand, sending a shiver up her spine. “Yeah,” he replies, and she can feel the rumble of his voice under her hand. “You’re here now.”

Before she can change her mind, Lizzy closes her fingers around the faded fabric of his frock coat and pulls him to herself, tilting her head to avoid the point of his tricorn. His mouth feels strange against hers. The flat, ribbed texture of his lips is new and unfamiliar, but they’re warm, and the way they move slow and sure against hers kindles the same primal heat as ever. One of his hands curls around her jaw; the other rests flat on the small of her back and pulls her closer. His tongue dips between her parted lips, and a soft noise of contentment spills from her mouth despite herself.

She mounts no resistance when he moves to trap her between himself and the desk. He’s found the band of skin between the hem of her tank top and the waist of her leathers, and the warm, rough pads of his fingers stipple her back with gooseflesh.

“First time with a ghoul, huh? Having second thoughts?”

“Not so far,” she replies, and slips her arms in a loose hold around his neck. “Does the hat ever come off?”

He slips a knee between her thighs, and warmth floods the pit of her belly. “Only on special occasions.”

“Oh? And does this count?”

He smiles against her mouth. “You betcha.”

Lizzy reaches for the crown of his tricorn with one hand, pulls it off his bald head, and drops it on top of the terminal sitting on the desk. As strange as he looks, the heat bubbling up inside her doesn’t relent. She pulls her tank top over her head and lets it fall to the floor.

Warmth rises to her cheeks as his gaze glides down her body. Her undergarments are practical, the gauzy lace she originally wore under her vault suit long swapped for something more utilitarian. The pills have helped her shed the baby weight, but the stretch marks haven’t yet faded, not that he seems to mind. “They don’t make ‘em like you anymore,” he says, one finger brushing her bottom lip, her collarbone, the space between her breasts.

Her nipples harden at his touch. He sweeps her hair over her shoulder to better trace the curve of her neck with his mouth, and her heart is pounding so hard in the hollow of her throat he can probably taste it.

He’s right. Nate may have been her first, but so’s Hancock, in many ways: the first man after Nate, after the world ended, the first to fuck her without loving her, and yes, the first ghoul.

Grief wells up her throat, sudden enough to choke—and god, what is she even _doing?_ —but if she ever betrayed Nate, it was years ago when she let her mind stray to thoughts of another man. Hancock swallows the strangled noise that comes out of her mouth, and she surrenders to the heat of his palms and mouth on her body, watching the slow crawl of the sunset light across the room as desire floods her bloodstream.

She only breaks away to kick off her boots and squeeze herself out of her leathers. Hancock follows her lead, shrugging off his frock coat and letting it pool at his feet, then crowds her back till she’s sitting on the edge of the desk.

He moves like he had all the time in the world. His thumbs ride higher and higher up her thighs, teasing the front of her underwear, then pulls the cups of her bra down to bare her breasts. He closes his mouth gently around the tight nub of one nipple, then the other, his tongue running in teasing swirls. By the time he drops to his knees between her open thighs, she’s a breathless heap, her toes curled in anticipation, the fabric of her underwear already damp. She heaves herself off the desk so he can slip it off her, and then she’s sitting there exposed, the ghoul mayor of Goodneighbour lifting her leg with one hand. “Ain’t many people I’d get on my knees for,” he says, and the warmth of his breath on the inside of her thigh sends her shivering.

The wet heat of his tongue follows the words. Lizzy arches her back, and surprises herself with a throaty moan that feels entirely too loud among the creaks and groans of the Old State House. She bites a knuckle to muffle the needy, high-pitched noises coming out of her, but Hancock reaches up with one hand to clasp her wrist. “Hey, none of that,” he says, grinning. “Let me hear ya.”

He hears her, all right, and no doubt so does a sizable portion of Goodneighbour. His touch starts off light and feathery, quick brushes of his tongue that whip up her blood into a flurry. She grips the lip of the desk with both hands, one heel propped up on the edge shamelessly, and arcs against his mouth to feel more of it. Hancock provides: his tongue moves harder against her, every flick winding pleasure more tightly inside her belly, and the light thrum of his voice as a low moan drags out of him sends heat flaring white-hot between her legs. When he slides two fingers inside her, she forgets all about trying to keep quiet. She’s crying out now, head thrown back as she pants and whimpers and begs, clenching hard around his fingers.

Her orgasm comes as a relief. It snaps through her like a rubber band; pleasure sweeps through her like a shockwave, and the whole desk shakes with her, so hard it sends a tin of Mentats clattering to the floor. Hancock doesn’t stop, fingers and mouth moving till her body slackens again.

He pulls himself back to his feet, sucking his fingers clean. “Man, if I could bottle up that taste, I’d be one rich ghoul.”

Lizzy lets out a feeble laugh, then tugs at the American flag tied around his hips to pull him between her open thighs. “That was … _whew_. I needed that.”

“Happy to help,” he replies, then leans forward to kiss her again. She can feel how hard he is through the rough fabric of his jeans, and the slickness of her own arousal on his mouth sends a fresh pulse of desire through her. “Hey, since you’re new to the wasteland and all,” he says when she slips the makeshift sash loose, “ghouls shoot blanks, just so you know.”

That startles a laugh out of her. “Is that your idea of dirty talk, mister mayor?”

He lets out a sheepish laugh at that. “Well, not that we have to go all the way,” he says with a chuckle, even as she fumbles with the button and zipper of his jeans. “Not everyone can handle the whole ghoulish package, pun not—”

Lizzy closes her hand around him and he goes quiet, save for a low grunt that thrums all the way between her legs. “I can handle it,” she answers sweetly, feeling him stiffen in her hand as she moves it up and down a few times. His eyes are narrowed to thin black slits when she looks up at him, and because she might as well keep doing things she’s never done before, she bites her bottom lip and says, “Fuck me.”

For once he has no quip or comeback. She tugs her bra off, then reaches between their bodies to guide him inside her, her legs wrapped around his hips. As his mouth covers hers again, the whole, hard length of his cock slips into her. Their kiss muffles her mewling cry of pleasure; she hooks her feet at the ankles, squeezing a low, throaty moan out of him, and then he’s fucking her in earnest, one arm braced against the wall. Lizzy fumbles with the buttons of his shirt till they come loose, then tugs it open. His chest is bony and lean under the warm, corrugated feel of his skin, and he leans into her touch, fingers digging into the meat of her thighs as his hipbones slap rhythmically against her. She can’t tell if it’s the two centuries spent in the cryo-pod or just how _different_ he feels inside her, but heat builds up again steady and sure in the pit of her belly, and she fists her hands into the ruffled collar of his shirt to pull him even closer, tightening her legs’ hold around his hips.

It’s not enough.

“Wait,” she pants, then slides down the desk and turns around. That earns her an appreciative whistle and a light slap on the ass, and then he’s back inside her, his chest pressed to her shoulder blades. His hands are now free to roam her body; he cups her face, one finger sliding between her parted lips before his hand glides down her throat, her breasts, her stomach, and finally slips between her legs.

“How’s that feel?” he whispers in her ear, stroking her with two fingers. “Too much?”

She gives a short, jerky shake of her head. “Don’t stop,” she pants.

He doesn’t. He moves hard and fast, and she moves back against him, matching his rhythm. Each thrust sends him deep inside her, and she can’t help the open-mouthed cries that spill out of her each time his hips smack her ass. His breath comes in quick, short spurts against the nape of her neck, and words trickle to her ear through her own strangled, shameless noises: how tight, how wet she is, how fucking good she feels, and the sheer lewdness of it sends tongues of flame unfurling from the node heating under his fingers to the rest of her body.

A glint of gold on her splayed hand. The light of the setting sun burnishes her wedding band, and she shuts her eyes hard to block out the sight. Nate’s still there, though, something she doesn’t care to name in his brown eyes and disappointment dripping from his every word— _the pianist I might’ve understood, but this creature?_ —but if a sob escapes her, it’s easy enough to pass it off as just another cry of pleasure.

Not that the pleasure’s gone, though, quite the opposite. It gathers inside her, nearing its crest as Hancock’s fingers keep working between her legs; then he finds some way to angle himself even deeper inside her, and the guilt, the grief, the fear, the room and the Old State House and Goodneighbour, _everything_ burns up in the bright pulsing flare that fills her from head to toe. Her arms crumble under her own weight, and Hancock works her through the aftershocks while she cries out against the dusty laminate of the desk. He rams into her a few more times before coming too, twitching deep inside her with a groan that sends heat sweeping through her anew.

He drops his head on her shoulder, his panting breath warm in her hair. “If I’d known you were in that vault all this time, I’d have broken you out myself,” he says against her skin.

He fishes a tissue box out of a drawer—a rare commodity in the post-world war—then leaves her to clean up while he makes his way to one of the old couches, his jeans still riding low on his waist, his open shirt baring one bony shoulder. A cloud of dust rises and swirls in the last of the sunlight when he lets himself fall back on the couch before taking a long swig from a bottle of wine. For a moment she wonders if he expects her to just get dressed and leave, but before she can reach for her clothes he lifts one hand and motions her over. “C’mere,” he says, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Lizzy crosses the falling eddies of dust to slowly drape herself over him, then helps herself to a few sips of lukewarm wine. “Shoulda offered you some before, heh,” he adds, thumbing a drop of wine off her bottom lip.

“In all fairness,” she replies, then licks his thumb clean, “I didn’t exactly come here expecting flowers and candlelight.”

“So I gathered.” Hancock grins. “Well, glad to see your little nap in that icebox hasn’t left you, uh … _frigid_.”

She snorts, taken aback by the—frankly awful—pun. “This is no laughing matter, I’ll have you know. Two hundred and ten years is one hell of a dry spell.”

The grin widens, and the light of the lantern dances in his eyes. “And there I was, worried you’d be cold to my advances.”

“Hancock, please,” she chides him, trying not to laugh.

“Sorry,” he replies, sounding anything but. “Still getting warmed up.”

And then she’s laughing, _really_ laughing, laughing for the first time in two hundred years, and god, she’s missed that just as much as the sex and someone’s touch on her body, if not more. She laughs, dropping her forehead to the ridged expanse of his chest, weeks of tension loosening somewhere inside her ribcage, and between the laughter and the post-orgasmic haze, Lizzy feels almost drunk.

Hancock chuckles into her hair. “Damn, easy crowd,” he says, tracing lazy circles on her back.

Composing herself, she laces her fingers together, hands flat on his chest, and rests her chin over them. “For the record, that was not funny in the _least_.”

That shit-eating grin again. “Course not,” he says, then reaches for one of the inhalers on the coffee table. “D’you mind?”

She blinks at the red plastic pump, and shakes her head. “How does it feel?”

A sly smile slants his mouth. “Like what we just did, but _different_ ,” he answers, and oh, she’d be a liar if that didn’t arouse her curiosity, among other things. “I’d say you gotta try it for yourself, not that you have to.”

Her internal debate lasts all of two seconds. “Sure.”

“Ghouls ain’t hit as hard,” he explains, then slowly, slowly, as if to give her ample time to change her mind, slips the mouthpiece between her parted lips. Her pulse quickens, an echo of the almost dizzying anticipation she felt when she crossed the doorway of his office, but Lizzy never backs out, so she closes her lips around the mouthpiece and waits for him to push the canister. “But you, you’re gonna fly.”

A puff of air, and she’s soaring. The Jet hits her bloodstream instantly; a wild, giddy rush floods her chest like she was standing on the edge of a skyscraper, the wind lashing her with its billion screaming colours. She hasn’t seen colours like this since before the bombs: everything is crisp and saturated, the muted reds and browns of the room now bleeding out of their edges, the lavender sky rolling in like ribbons from the windows. Strips of Magnolia’s song drift to them from the Third Rail; Lizzy can count the dust motes swirling around the glow of the lantern, the stars shining through the ceiling, eavesdrop on every single conversation taking place within the barbed-wired walls of Goodneighbour. Hell, she can hold the whole goddamned Commonwealth in her mind, and all she has to do is reach in and pluck Shaun out of the Institute’s grasp.

“So?” Hancock asks, and the vibrating hum of his voice pulls her crashing back down to the couch where they’re lying tangled together. She can sense every minute movement of his tongue and lips as he speaks. “How’s it feel?”

Electrifying, dizzying, overwhelming—she could pop all the Mentats in the world and still not find the right words, so she leans into the lingering, lung-warm eddies of his words and kisses him instead. She’s aware of every square millimeter of skin where their bodies meet, every strand of hair on her head parting around his fingers, every effervescent cell leaping to meet his touch. His mouth tastes like wine, and the wet glide of his tongue between her lips skitters across every nerve ending and shoots down straight between her legs.

She’s wet again; he’s getting hard again already, and the sensations are too much for her body to hold. They brim over, shattering the world into kaleidoscopic fractals, tastes and sounds and multicoloured hues whipped together like ice cream swirls. The night unfolds out of order, in oil-slick fragments: his voice in her ear, his hand in her hair, his cock in her mouth and then inside her again, on her back, on all fours, straddling him. Time stretches, and she spends centuries teetering on the edge, pleasure folding itself in bright incandescent layers, and when at last she shatters under the pressure the whole world comes undone with her, music and starlight filling all the open spaces inside her.

* * *

It’s almost sundown again by the time Lizzy makes it back to the Memory Den. She woke up to chip music late the next day, Hancock’s red frock coat draped over her naked body, and found him smoking and playing Red Menace on his terminal. Computer games were Nate’s thing, not hers, but she sat in Hancock’s lap and had a turn when Hancock offered, till she lost interest in favour of his distractingly clever hands.

 _You should stay with me while you’re still in Goodneighbour, save you some caps_ , he said after, and promised to deal with Marowski himself when she agreed.

 _So that happened_ , she thinks, squinting at the faded cardboard cutout guarding the red door Irma motioned her to. Not that she’s complaining—there are worse fates than being the current favourite hobby of Goodneighbour’s mayor, as evidenced by how luxuriously sore he’s left her.

She finds a rare splinter-free area on the door where to rap her knuckles, and a voice invites her in. “You got the memory pod loaded up?” the same voice asks, then the ghoul it belongs to blinks, startled. “Oh, you’re not Irma.”

“Hi, Mister Connolly,” Lizzy says, poking her head inside the small room. “Mayor Hancock said I should talk to you.”

Not the best opener, it turns out. Kent’s eyes grow twice their size at that, displaying all the burst capillaries around the pale irises in their frightful glory. Evidently not everyone’s as eager as she was to end up on Hancock’s radar.

 _His radar?_ Nate sneers, somewhere at the back of her mind. _Is that what we’re calling it now?_

Lizzy ignores her late husband and offers Kent a sweet, apologetic smile, kicking herself for the lapse. “Sorry. It’s nothing bad, I promise,” she says, then gropes for words before settling on: “I just … I just needed someone to talk to.”

He relaxes visibly, though his features still can’t seem to decide between alarm and curiosity. “Oh, sorry. Goodneighbour’s just crazy, you know? Thought maybe I’d ticked the—the wrong people off.”

She’s not sure how someone who spends most of his time cooped up in a backroom at the Memory Den would even get himself noticed by anyone of import (come to think of it, she’s surprised Hancock even knows of him, let alone by name), but there’s no use pointing that out. Her gaze sweeps the room as she makes her way to him. Old, frayed posters cling for dear life to the peeling red paint of the walls, and more cardboard cutouts have been placed in neat, serried rows next to the unoccupied memory pod. The Silver Shroud, Rhett Reinhart, the Mistress of Mystery … Lizzy grins. “Silver Shroud, huh? I see I’m in the presence of a fan.”

A genuine smile lights up Kent’s face at that. “Yeah! You ever listened to the show?”

She braces herself for the memories and the swell of grief carrying them: her family huddled around the radio, Lizzy sitting on the living room carpet, dad fiddling with the buttons and pretending the radio was broken till she nearly went into hysterics. Looking at Kent, it occurs to her there’s a chance they might still be alive, but her mind betrays her with images of her parents gone feral and feeding on corpses, and she slams the door shut on that particular train of thought. Dead. They have to be dead.

She clears her throat. “My family and I used to listen to every new episode when they aired,” she says, then seeing Kent’s puzzled expression, explains: “I was in cryogenic storage in a vault, and just woke up not long ago.” She grins. “You know, just like—”

“Just like Mister Abominable,” they finish in unison, then both start laughing.

“You really know your stuff,” Kent says excitedly, his previous reservations now obviously forgotten. “Took me years, but I tracked down some of the original recordings and play them over the radio,” he says, tapping the console sitting next to his desk proudly. “Hope it makes someone’s day a little easier out there.”

She likes him, she decides. “I’m sure it does,” she says, making a mental note to tune in one of these days. She lets her fingertips brush the Mistress of Mystery’s iconic Eye of Ra on the cutout. “I was an actress, back in the day. I actually came pretty close to getting the part of the Mistress for that TV show that was announced.”

Kent’s eyes ricochet from her face to the cutout and back a few times. “Oh man, that’d have been amazing! Heard they ended up casting Claire Redelle,” he adds conspiratorially, his face clouding over, and Lizzy can’t help the petty satisfaction she feels at that. Got one up on Redelle in the end. “But you, you look just like her!”

She cocks one hip to the side and pitches her voice in the low, sultry tones of the Mistress. “‘Treacherous toad, you defiled my sacred sanctum?’” she says, addressing a poster depicting the Mechanist, then draws an imaginary blade. “‘For that, you will feel my fury! Behold the Blade of Bastet!’”

Kent laughs with her, and the playful glint in his eyes would suit a child more than a two-century-old ghoul. “A shame we never got that TV show in the end, what with the bombs and all,” he says, then considers her for a moment. “Must have been a real shock for you, coming out of that vault, huh?”

“You can say that again,” Lizzy sighs, sitting down on the couch. “How did you get used to”—she gestures vaguely—“ _everything_?”

“Mainly I focused on survival. It got real bad at first after the bombs. Still not many safe places for ghouls now, and Goodneighbour’s got murders, theft, worse. Sometimes you just gotta escape a little to make it through the day.”

Lizzy listens, elbows propped on her knees, chin resting on her hands. He tells her about Thanksgiving 2071, the twelve-pound turkey his mother made, the Silver Shroud episode his family listened to. Her eyes fill with tears; she can’t imagine surviving the initial blast only to turn into a ghoul, and then, having lost everyone and everything you held dear, _not dying_ , even as years turn to decades turn to centuries. No wonder he’s chosen to relive the past instead, day after day.

Without thinking, she reaches for Kent’s hand across the table and gives it a squeeze. For a moment he stares at it like he had no idea what it was, then squeezes it back hesitantly.

“Thank you for talking with me,” she says when she trusts her voice again.

Kent blinks up at her as she pulls herself to her feet. “C—come back anytime you want,” he calls out after her.

She gives him a wobbling smile over her shoulder, then closes the door. Deep breaths—she blinks back the tears burning at the corners of her eyes, and decides against returning to the Old State House when the rows of blinking, purring memory loungers come into focus again. The caps Hancock got back from Marowski on her behalf are burning a hole in her pocket all of a sudden. Irma and Amari don’t even bother reminding her of the risks this time, and Lizzy is reclining in one of the pods within the minute, the clear dome descending over her with a hiss of decompressing air.

Her conversation with Kent made the choice easy. She wants the stage again, the jittery minutes before the curtain rises, the susurrus of conversation steadily growing louder, pierced with the occasional laugh; the heady intoxication of another soul inhabiting her flesh for the span of a night, someone else’s words in her mouth, someone else’s movements and mannerisms guiding her body. Cinderella, Hermia, Sally Bowles—anyone but Lizzy Oslow née Hayes, if only for an hour or two. Not even Jet quite matched the exalted joy of the cheers and applause, and the projectors like the light at the end of the tunnel, marking the end of that brief life.

She watches herself stumble backstage, still giddy. Her eyes twinkle like green stars, and a rose colour rides high on her cheeks. “Vivian,” she exclaims when she spots the old friend waiting for her backstage. “You should’ve told me you’d be here tonight! I’d have gotten you those tickets comped.”

Vivian O’Dell, as sharp as ever in a purple pant suit, her red hair gathered at the back of her head. That was the last time they saw each other. “Ah, don’t worry about that. Dammit, you, stop being so pretty,” Vivian adds, holding her at arm’s length to better study her. Then she motions to her companion, a man in thick glasses and a beige suit jacket. “This is Peter Shiner. He’s chief of publishing at Hubris.”

Shiner’s grip is firm as he shakes her hand. “That was a brilliant performance,” he says.

“I told you, she’s magnificent,” Vivian says.

“Yeah. Yes, she is. Goddamn, that changes everything.”

Lizzy sits on the edge of the counter, the light bulbs around the mirror casting a golden halo around the contours of her body. “Will you bring me up to speed, Vivi?”

“We’re at an impasse with the casting of the Mistress for the Shroud series,” Vivian explains. “Internecine war. The producers are pushing to replace Shannon Rivers with Claire Redelle, but the lead writer’s having none of it.”

“ _Claire Redelle_?” Lizzy blurts out.

“I know,” Vivian sighs. Shiner scuffs the toe of his shoe on the floor.

Her eyes dart between their faces. “What’s wrong with Rivers? She’s been the Mistress longer than I’ve been alive.”

“And therein lies the problem,” Shiner says, pushing his glasses back on his nose with one finger. “They claim Shannon’s too old to play the part on TV. And not to put too fine a point on it, but they’re right, I’m afraid.”

“So I figured, why not go back to the drawing board? A new face might be just what we need, and spare us Redelle’s notorious attitude,” Vivian adds in a stage whisper. Always with a solution to any problem, Vivi. No wonder she ended up exactly where she wanted. “And that’s where _you_ come in. How would you feel about playing the Mistress of Mystery on TV?”

It hurts to see the unmistakable hope on her face. Shiner must’ve noticed her expression too, because he says, “Now don’t get too excited. We still need to get the rest of the team on board.”

“I can be pretty convincing, though,” Vivian says, winking. “You’re free at the end of the season, right?”

Her smile falters, almost imperceptibly. “Well, technically, yes, but …” They both look at her expectantly, and she braces herself for their reaction. “I’m pregnant. Due in June.”

Shiner’s face falls at that. At least Vivian attempts to conceal her obvious disappointment. “That explains the glow, then,” she says, hugging her. “Congratulations, dear.”

Promises crowd Lizzy’s mouth, but none that she can keep. They excuse themselves after a few pleasantries, leaving her to the rich, powdery fragrance of the two dozen red roses Nate would always send her when he missed her performances, which was increasingly frequently. The confident lines and loops of his handwriting peek through the stalks where a card has been tucked, the thorns carefully shaved off. _Shine bright, my star_ , she reads, followed by the same bold signature she’s seen on countless cheques and receipts.

It could’ve been just any other premiere, but this one stands out as the last. The stage makeup accentuates the downwards curve of her mouth in the mirror, dark ringlets brushing the neckline of her costume; she dutifully starts removing the rouge from her lips, blissfully unaware that soon she’d never step on a stage again. By the time Shaun was born, most of the glittering signs in the theatre district had long gone dark, and the limited skillset of an aspiring actress wasn’t exactly in demand when so many people struggled to keep themselves fed.

She had it good in hindsight, no matter how unfair it all seemed at the time. Nate’s position at Mass Fusion, and its involvement in classified military projects even she knew nothing about, were the only reason she never went hungry except on purpose.

Diet pills when food rationing was in place. God, she hopes Amari isn’t seeing this on her screen.

By the time Lizzy slinks out of the Memory Den, the night has dragged itself over the Commonwealth, and despite Goodneighbour’s lights she can see more stars overhead than she’s ever seen in her life. It’s beautiful, she knows, all in pale milky swaths and twinkling pinpricks, but it fails to move her. All it does is make her feel even more insignificant: forgotten by time itself, left behind while the rest of the world has moved on, with all of its broken bones healed twisted and crooked. Not worth hiring, not worth loving, not worth the extra bullet it would’ve taken to put her out of her misery, back in the vault. The backup, always and forever.

A chill runs through her at the memory of the cryo-pod, and she wraps her arms around herself as she walks, aimless. She follows the spidery cracks running along the streets, chips of concrete crunching under her heels, till a wrong turn somewhere takes her down some narrow backstreet reeking of piss. She’s about to retrace her steps when a husky voice hails her. “Hey, you. Looking for work?”

A ghoul is staring at her through a window in a metal gate. Lizzy’s instincts tell her to take off running, but she thinks of Shaun, of the caps she wasted at the Memory Den instead of saving them to hire MacCready. “Not if it’s some sort of sex thing,” she replies suspiciously. She’s not _that_ desperate.

The ghoul sniffs. “Don’t flatter yourself, girl. No one wants the mayor’s hand-me-downs,” she retorts, sending heat rushing up Lizzy’s face. Word travels fast in Goodneighbour. “Keep your clothes on and your mouth shut, and we’ll all be happier for it.”

“Maybe you’d have an easier time hiring if you weren’t such an asshole, just saying,” Lizzy huffs.

The bloodshot eyes in the window roll back in their sockets. “Well, aren’t we precious. Look, are you in or not?”

What the hell. Caps are caps. “Fine,” she relents.

To Bobbi’s credit, this is the first job Lizzy’s been offered that doesn’t involve murder. “You’re gonna be doing some digging,” Bobbi announces, so Lizzy makes her way underground and gets to work, trying to open up a passage in the dark, damp tunnel. At least she’s too busy praying it doesn’t collapse on top of her to think about Shaun, but her respite is short-lived. The instant the wall crumbles down, revealing a narrow stairway dropping deeper underground, three mirelurks come skittering out of the dark.

The other two tunnel workers have the good sense to flee, but Lizzy scrambles for the laser pistol at her hip. At least the stairway forces them in an orderly line as they scurry up the crumbled steps, but in her panic the beam of her pistol simply glances off their shells. She forces her hands steady despite her pulse hammering wild, and aims at the small, frightful face peeking under the carapace of the first mirelurk.

It drops dead halfway up the stairs after a dozen shots. The second simply crawls over the corpse, and crowds her back into the tunnel as she keeps shooting. It’s close enough for her to see the hissing smoke rising from the holes the beam burns into the shell. The smell of cooked meat hits her through the damp of the tunnel, and Lizzy gags just as the mirelurk collapses at her feet.

That still doesn’t deter the last one. The dome of its shell bobs over its dead companions as Lizzy takes aim and fires.

The beam of her pistol fizzles out to nothing.

“ _Shit_ ,” she says, discarding the empty fusion cell. She scrambles backwards, rummaging around the pockets of her leather jacket for a new one. Her hands shake as she tries to reload the pistol, frantically dodging the pincers snapping at her.

The cell finally clicks into place. She lifts her pistol back in front of her, and the heel of her boot catches on a stray brick.

Lizzy slams back against the ground. The air whooshes out of her lungs, and her pistol clatters to the stone. She attempts to grab it, but the mirelurk has already crawled on top of her, clawed appendages pinning her down into place. Beady round eyes hover above her; a chitinous beak snaps at her face, and two pairs of smaller pincers wriggle in front of her. Lizzy screams, cradling her head protectively.

A pincer snaps shut around her arm. The crushing force sends tears rushing to her eyes, and the pain is enough to make her nauseous. She tries to pull herself free, but the creature’s grip is vise-like. The pistol is still just out of reach, but unless Bobbi chooses the next few seconds to come to her rescue, it’s her only chance. Lizzy stretches out her hand and kicks the mirelurk’s belly to give herself some momentum, ignoring the smaller claws pinching at her leg. The other pincer snaps a hair’s breadth away from her face, so close she can feel the displaced air on her cheek. She wriggles the fingers of her splayed hand towards the pistol, stretching her arm till her shoulder joint aches.

Her finger hooks around the trigger guard. Lizzy shoves the pistol between the increasingly small space between herself and the mirelurk’s face. Another pincer closes around the barrel, but she doesn’t let go this time. At least she can’t miss this close: the laser burns through the softer shell of the belly, drawing a horrible, high-pitched scream that has no business coming out of a crustacean. Her hand is slippery with mirelurk guts before long, but she doesn’t stop, not till the fusion cell’s empty and the trigger clicks under her finger, and the creature has crumbled dead on top of her.

An acrid burning smell is rising in the damp air of the tunnel. Lizzy pulls her throbbing arm free from the loosening grip of the pincer, then lets herself fall back against the ground, panting hard. The blood is pounding so hard in her ears she doesn’t even notice Bobbi till the ghoul leans above her.

“Good,” Bobbi’s upside-down face says. “You’re still alive.”

“No thanks to you,” Lizzy pants. “ _Fuck_.”

Of course the rest of the job involves several complications Bobbi No-Nose failed to mention the first time around. Lizzy pockets her advance—still not enough for her to _do_ anything—then stumbles back into Goodneighbour’s backstreets, gulping down the comparatively fresh air. She lets herself fall back against a wall, the cold of the bricks seeping through the leather of her jacket. The pincer left the sleeve punctured with holes, and thin rilles of blood drip down her hand to pitter against the concrete.

It’s all she can do not to sob. Her baby’s still gone, and she’s running on empty. The Old State House feels miles and miles away.

“Hey, toots,” someone says, and Lizzy looks up to find one of the Neighbourhood Watch ghouls surveying her. “Everything all right?”

 _No_ , she wants to say. _No, everything is_ not _all right_. Her abused arm and contusions are the least of her problems, really, but if she lets herself think about everything that’s gone wrong she’s going to whip herself up into full-blown hysteria. She blows out a deep, stuttering breath instead. “I’ve been better,” she replies through the tightness constricting her throat.

He lowers the barrel of his machine gun as he considers her. “You headin’ to the Old State House?”

So the whole town knows she’s Hancock’s current plaything. “Yeah,” she answers. He attempts to sling her good arm around his shoulders at that, but she draws back. “I’ll get blood all over your suit,” she says, inanely.

That cracks him up. “Nothing a little Abraxo can’t fix. C’mon.”

This time, Lizzy offers no resistance when he slips her arm around his shoulders and leads her back to the main street, getting busier and busier as the night deepens. They hobble together to the Old State House, and though she doesn’t really need the help to walk, she’s grateful for the company. She finds out his name is Clarence, and he tells her about the Freedom Trail and Diamond City’s noodles till they reach the pillared doorway of the Old State House. “Go see KL-E-0 and get yourself somethin’ that shoots real bullets. Those toy guns ain’t worth shit,” he adds, nodding towards the laser pistol strapped to her hip.

A new firearm is low on her list of priorities, but Lizzy promises to do so anyway and thanks him profusely for his help. Then she hauls herself up the spiral staircase of the Old State House step by creaking step, her arm cradled to her chest. She doubts she’ll ever make it to Hancock’s office right up to the moment the door closes behind her. She leans back against it to catch her breath, aching all over. Hard to believe it’s only been a few hours since she was last here: it feels like ages, like she’d just stumbled out of her cryo-pod some two hundred and ten years in the future.

Hancock—sitting on the couch, the heels of his boots propped on the edge of the coffee table—blinks at her above his copy of Astoundingly Awesome Tales. “Whoa, did I miss another brawl at the Third Rail?”

The back of her eyes prickles. Some nameless emotion wells up inside her, and Lizzy recognizes it as relief when she finds herself smiling against all odds. “You should see the other guy,” she says, pushing herself off the door and stumbling to the couch.

He’s already on his feet, rummaging around a cabinet. “Nah,” he replies, then grins at her above his shoulder. “Rather be lookin’ at you.”

That draws another smile out of her. “Flatterer,” she retorts, then drops her gaze to the discarded magazine on the coffee table. _Sinister Seafood Strikes!!_ announces the cover in flashy letters, while some tentacled creature looms in the background. She sticks her tongue out at it.

Hancock returns with a first aid kit. Lizzy slackens the straps of her Pip-Boy, then peels her jacket off, wincing as it pulls at the blood already crusting her wounds, and examines the damage. The puncture marks where the pincer broke skin are swollen and oozing blood, thin streaks of it swirling down her arm, and the crushing pressure left the skin mottled purple. She’s lucky it didn’t break the bone—or her Pip-Boy, god forbid—but the edges of her vision swim at the sight all the same. She looks away, focusing her attention on the way the light of the lantern dances on the plastic case of a holotape.

Hancock whistles admiringly. “Damn. Do I need to pay someone a visit?”

A feeble laugh shakes itself out of her throat. “Already took care of it,” she answers, hoping he won’t press her for details.

Thankfully he doesn’t. “Atta girl. That’s what I like to hear.”

The first aid kit creaks open; out of the corner of her eyes, she sees him pull a bottle of antiseptic and a roll of gauze from the metal case. Gently, he pulls her arm to himself, and sets himself to the task of cleaning her wounds, humming along to Nat King Cole on the radio like this was his idea of a good time.

She didn’t expect this, but most of all she doesn’t expect him to be so gentle. His fingers are light on her wrist as he turns her arm over in the wavering light of the lantern, the pressure gentle as he cleans her wounds. Still, the pain drags a low hiss or two out of her.

Hancock chuckles. “Come on, killer. You’ve been through much worse than this.” No need to ask what he means. Lizzy turns away from him before she can stop herself, her cheeks burning, but the scar on her face cuts straight between them. He flicks a glance at her, and his voice softens despite the lingering amusement. “Meant childbirth, but hey, scars are a good thing,” he says, returning his attention to her arm. “Means you’re still alive.”

 _That’s a pretty face, doll_. “Almost makes me wish I wasn’t,” she says, too tired to deflect. “I have enough reminders as it is.”

Hancock looks at her. “Hey, I’ve been there. I get it. May not seem like it right now, but there’s stuff worth living for. You’ve got your kid, right?”

She really doesn’t want to talk about Shaun. “If I can find him.”

“C’mon. I’m lookin’ into this tip about where Valentine might be. Things ain’t that hopeless.”

And then what? A goddamned _mirelurk_ nearly killed her. Even if Hancock figures out Valentine’s whereabouts, how can she hope to face whoever—or whatever—got the upper hand on an actual detective?

 _Come with me_ , Lizzy almost says, but Hancock won’t leave his town for her sake, she knows.

She traces the swirls in the grain of the ancient, scuffed wood of the table with her eyes while Hancock works in silence. “For what it’s worth, I like the scar,” he says after a moment, uncapping the antiseptic bottle. “Makes you look real. ‘Sides, folk like me are a lot more likely to notice the nose sitting in the middle of your face.”

Embarrassment flashes warm across her face. She braces herself for the burn of the antiseptic, blowing out a deep breath till it fades, leaving only a dull ache behind.

Then she looks at him through the watery film stinging her eyes. “Did it hurt?” she whispers.

He glances up at her, a flash of light reflecting in his dark eyes. “When I fell from heaven? Figured we’d sinned enough you’d know that ain’t where I’m from.”

She laughs under her breath. “Becoming a ghoul,” she says before she can talk herself out of it.

Hancock pins the end of the roll of gauze under his thumb and wraps it around her forearm. “Ain’t any transformation that doesn’t, I reckon,” he answers, then slants his mouth in a crooked grin. “But I was too high to remember.” He flicks his switchblade open, slices the strip of gauze, and secures it with a piece of duct tape. “Here. Nothin’ to it.”

Lizzy misses the warmth of his fingers the instant they leave her arm. “Thank you.”

“Heh, patched you up to better rough you up, so y’know. Only fair.” He rummages around the first aid kit and pulls out a syringe. “Need somethin’ for the pain? Got some Med-X here.”

Maybe this will numb her mind along with her arm. She stretches it out to him before she can talk herself out of it, more relieved than she cares to admit to feel his touch again when he clasps one hand above her elbow and squeezes. Lizzy watches the teal-coloured streaks of her veins swell, the needle sink into the crook of her elbow, the pinkish cloud of blood flowering into the clear medicine.

He only injects about half the dose; the rest goes into his own arm, and then he pulls her close, not even bothering to slip his sleeve back on. Closing her eyes, Lizzy lets herself fall against him, and breathes in the hot, rich scent of his collar, leather and smoke and the faint metallic tang of iron or blood. At first she wonders if he gave her enough Med-X, but before she even knows it, a sort of cottony, muted bliss has seeped into her limbs and wrapped itself around her like bandages, and the pain has faded to a dull, distant throb. Her body feels pleasantly heavy against his, her cheek made for the curve of his hand, and her mouth seeks his of its own accord.

Not real, she knows. Love is just another old-world luxury: they’re just playing pretend, but she finds comfort in the motions all the same, even knowing he won’t remember her days, years, centuries from now. She crawls into his lap, and for a long time they do nothing but kiss, hands and tongues and breaths moving together in a sluggish dance. Hancock fists one hand in her hair and gently pulls her head back to bare her throat; a soft, warm haze fills her as his lips close around her earlobe, then travel down the exposed column of her neck. She rolls her hips against his, slow as the breaking swell of the sea, and the rising heat inside her feels strangely disconnected from the movement. He sighs against her collarbone, worlds away.

This is nothing like the Jet-induced frenzy of the previous night. This time it’s slow, indolent, almost tender if she didn’t know any better. They shed their clothes one at a time, only bothering when they get in the way of hands or mouths. She finds herself lying back on the couch, the weight of Hancock’s body resting on top of her. His tongue traces leisurely paths all over her naked body, and lingers on her fresh collection of scratches and cuts, licks clean the tiny bead of blood that appeared in the crook of her elbow. Then his mouth finds its way between her thighs, and stays there.

Her mind doesn’t quite fit the leaking contours of her body anymore. A strangled cry of pleasure escapes her throat; Lizzy lifts her head off the armrest to catch Hancock’s dark, appreciative gaze, and watches his hands glide along the curves of her body while his mouth resumes its worship with renewed ardour.

For a split second she sees Nate’s hands there instead, tendons moving under smooth, sun-tanned skin and his wedding band shining on his ring finger, but gentle, white heat ripples through her and sears the vision away.

* * *

It’s not yet morning when she wakes, Hancock’s skinny arm thrown over her body. The night is quiet, uncharacteristically so for Goodneighbour. Not a sound except the slow, even rhythm of his breathing, the creaks and groans of the Old State House, someone’s heels clicking on the concrete below the boarded-up windows. Pale dust motes drift lazily in a moonbeam that drains all colour and warmth out of the room, leaving only its bleached bones behind.

“Well, glad one of us is having fun, at least,” someone says.

Lizzy’s heart leaps into her throat at the sound of the familiar voice, and she sits up all at once, wide awake. Hancock slips his arm off her and rolls over, still fast asleep. She presses the heels of her hands to her eyes till strange spots of colour fill the void behind her eyelids, but Nate’s still there afterwards, sitting on the edge of Hancock’s desk. “Nate,” she chokes out through the constricted tube of her throat. “You’re dead.”

“Very astute.” He swirls the ice cubes in his tumbler with a lazy flick of his wrist. Old Appalachia, aged nine years. The liquid shines with streaks of amber and gold as he takes a sip, his brown eyes not leaving hers. “Shouldn’t you be looking for our son?”

Doesn’t matter if he’s a dream or a figment of her imagination: she feels too exposed like this, lying naked with another man, so she slips out of bed, grabs her silk kimono off its hook, and shrugs it on. “I _am_ looking,” she defends herself, tying the belt into a loose knot at her waist.

Nate laughs, the ice cubes clinking against the sweating glass. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m _pretty_ damn sure you’re not going to find him in some chem head’s bed,” he replies, nodding in Hancock’s direction. “Didn’t take you long to replace me.”

Even dead, he can find his way under her skin in just a few words. She gives the pull-string of the floor lamp a sharp tug, and a warm, rosy glow washes over the room. “For fuck’s sake, Nate, I didn’t _replace_ you,” she retorts, then makes for the bottle of Old Appalachia and pours herself two knuckles of bourbon. Neat it is. “And even if I did, you’re dead. Till death do us part, right?”

Nate doesn’t rise to the bait, which only pisses her off even more. “But _Shaun_ ’s still alive,” he replies in that cool, collected tone he reserves for when she loses patience.

The bourbon tastes like fire. “I know damn well Shaun is still alive,” she snaps, moving to the window. Sanctuary Hills is quiet, stirred only by the barest autumn breeze, and the picture perfect suburban heaven beyond the glass panes makes her want to scream. “If you’re going to come back from the dead to lord it over me, at least make it something I don’t already spend every waking second thinking about, all right?”

“Then get your act together and fucking _do_ something about it.”

Lizzy lifts her hands in the air with a strangled noise of frustration. “I _am_. Christ, Nate, I _am_ doing something about it, but you don’t have the faintest clue what it’s like out there.” She jabs a shaking finger at the raised, red scar running across her face. “Did you see my fucking face? Does it look like I’m having the time of my life?”

Nate laughs into his glass. “That’s just like you, Liz. Everybody you’ve ever known is dead, and you’re still finding something to complain about.” He sweeps an arm around the room: the framed honeymoon pictures on the dresser, the expensive bedclothes and linens, the jewelry box that raiders would pick clean, centuries from now. Hancock’s somehow still asleep despite their ruckus. “You had everything you could ever want. What else did you need?”

“All I wanted from you was _you_ ,” she answers, nearly shouting. “But instead I barely ever got to see you.”

“Yes, because I was working my ass off at Mass Fusion so the military would stand a chance in hell.”

She can’t help the bilious laugh that rises up her throat. “Fat lot of good that did.”

He rolls his eyes, the whites flashing in the light. “Sure, blame me for the bombs while you’re at it. You can add it to my long list of crimes, right after failing to read minds and getting murdered—”

Without thinking, Lizzy smashes her tumbler to the floor. The glass shatters with a satisfying crash, and the bourbon splatters the varnished floorboards in a great shining arc. For a moment the only sound is the Whitfields’ dog barking outside. “ _You’re_ the one who asked me to marry you,” she shouts, her voice cracking. “ _You’re_ the one who wanted children, and for what? What was the point if you weren’t ever going to see either of us anyway?”

The line of his shoulders slopes in defeat at that. His tumbler clinks against the shining surface of the desk, and Nate makes his way to her, gingerly stepping around the shards of glass. “Liz—”

“And now you’ve left me alone _again_ ,” she interrupts, shrugging off the comforting hand he rests on her shoulder. “I’m all alone now because of _you_.”

She slams two weak fists down on his chest. Nate catches her wrists, and she struggles feebly against him for a second or two before giving up. His palms are very warm, the grip of his fingers strong around her thin wrists; she’s almost forgotten how handsome he is, all in solid, chiseled lines and kind eyes the colour of dark honey. Her fury burns itself out at his touch, and the sight of him starts to ripple and blur before her.

“Nate,” Lizzy asks, her voice a tremulous breath, “why did you have to die?”

His thumb brushes the small knob of her wrist. Twin tears roll down her cheeks, and Nate wipes them off with the back of his knuckles before pressing his lips to hers. She’s missed this—missed _him_ , the warmth of his mouth, the faint scratch of his five-o’clock shadow, the smoky vetiver of his cologne. They’ve kissed like this a million times since their very first kiss at the drive-in, ignoring _Night of the Fish Men’s Revenge_ in favour of each other, the sleeves of his varsity jacket tied around her neck, the taste of her bubblegum inadvertently ending up in his mouth. She could’ve kissed him like this a million more times. Should’ve had the chance.

Slowly, she unclenches her fists to splay her hands on his chest instead. His hand rests along the curve of her cheekbone; he lets their lips part, and leans his brow against hers. “Liz,” he whispers in the small, warm space between their mouths. “I’m sorry.”

She almost retorts with a saucy _For which thing?_ , but she knows: something hot and wet spreads under her hands, and she drops her gaze to his chest to see a bright red stain eating away at the white of his laundered, spotless cambric shirt. “No,” she gasps. She presses both hands to his heart like she could save him this time, but the blood keeps flowing between her fingers in thick, crimson rivulets. Nate watches her, his expression resigned and very, very sad.

Lizzy wakes up gasping and scrabbling frantically at the sheets. Someone is holding her from behind, and for a few moments she fights fruitlessly against their hold. “Hey, I got you,” the person says, and through the panic it takes her a moment to match the voice to Hancock and register the arms as his. “I got you.”

Reality settles back into place. The bedroom connecting to Hancock’s office; the ridged texture of his skin against her bare shoulder blades, the dip of his mattress, the blinding spars of sunlight filtering through the boards nailed to the windows. She buries her face into the pillow to smother the frustrated sob that wracks her. Not fair. Nate’s still dead, and she’s still alive, and everything’s still _shit_. She hates to let Hancock see her like this, but all she can do is cling to his arms and cry while he whispers sweet nothings, his breath teasing her hair. He holds her for a long time, till silent, tired tears replace the sobs, till she exhausts even those and all that’s left behind is a foggy dullness, not entirely unlike the Med-X.

She sniffles and swipes at her face with the back of her hand. “I’m sorry,” she says, her voice thick.

Hancock doesn’t let go. “Happens to the best of us,” he says, then presses a kiss to her shoulder. “Bad one, huh?”

“Yeah,” she answers, letting her head fall back against the wet pillow.

He doesn’t push her for details, which she’s come to appreciate about him. Instead he reaches for one of the bottles on the floor next to the bed and hands it to her, and Lizzy doesn’t even bother reading the label before downing a few greedy gulps. Vodka, and cheap vodka at that, but at least the fumes neatly sear away the salt taste of her tears, and the lining of her stomach for good measure. “Gross,” she chokes out, handing the bottle back.

Hancock laughs, then takes a swig himself before setting the bottle back down on the floor. “Clears your mind like nothing else.”

He offers her a cigarette, and they smoke in silence for a while, indistinct voices trickling in from the streets. The sunlight throws the divots and ridges of his skin in stark relief, the protrusions of his collarbone and ribs, the sinewy muscles of his arm contracting and relaxing each time he moves his smoke to his mouth. The vodka and nicotine steady her nerves, but Nate’s accusatory tone is still ringing about her head, her fingers still sticky with the memory of his blood.

She loved Nate.

And yet.

Lizzy closes her eyes and sighs, and in that dark, quiet space the truth emerges, undeniable. “I wasn’t happy,” she confesses in a whisper. “Before the war.”

Hancock doesn’t say anything, but he’s watching her, his gaze intent. He blows out a perfect smoke ring and waits for her to say more.

“I did _everything_ right,” she continues, and once the words start pouring out, drifting in the air with the smoke, she can’t seem to hold them back. “Got married to my high school sweetheart, had a beautiful son, didn’t have it anywhere near as bad as most folk during the war … and I still wanted something more. Something _else_.” The smoke of her cigarette escapes her mouth in a deflating sigh. “I keep catching myself wishing I’d done things differently, and then I remember none of it mattered in the end.”

 _Not true_ , a small voice says at the back of her mind. _You could’ve not had a child_.

Hancock flicks the ash off his cigarette, and the corners of his mouth lift in a sad smile. “No point regretting things. And happiness is overrated, if you ask me,” he replies in a blueish cloud of smoke. It does funny things to the sunlight before dissipating. “Ain’t anyone I know who’s found it, and those who do spend their whole lives terrified of losing it. You get your fun where you can, as long as you don’t hurt anyone else.”

Maybe he’s right. Till Goodneighbour, she hadn’t felt pleasure since she came out of the vault, and chemically enhanced though it was, the past day is the closest thing to joy she’s felt since even before that. She can’t bring herself to regret that, despite the guilt gnawing at her like carrion birds.

No reason it has to stop. “Can I stay in Goodneighbour?” she finally brings herself to ask.

“Course. Told ya, everybody’s welcome.” He looks at her again; streaks of sunlight blaze across the black pools of his eyes, and she knows the implications have dawned on him. “Maybe ain’t the best place for a kid, though.”

Lizzy doesn’t answer. She butts her cigarette and drags her gaze back to the ceiling, to the dusty, lifeless blades of the electric fan. God, she can’t. Can’t think about Shaun’s tiny round face, Nate’s kind brown eyes in miniature, the cooing, warbling noises he made every time she bent over his crib. Somehow, it’s easier to face the thought of her baby being dead than the alternative, alive and alone at the mercy of these _people_ —

“Lizzy.”

She pinches the web of meat between her thumb and forefinger, and blinks back the tears stinging her eyes. “What chance has he got, anyway? He’s just a _baby_.”

“All the more reason to find him. You’re all that kid’s got left.”

“Even if I find this Valentine, Shaun could be at the other end of the continent for all I know. _If_ he’s still alive.”

“ _You_ made him,” Hancock retorts, and somehow she didn’t expect him to feel strongly one way or another. This conversation isn’t going the way she expected at all. “You better be damn sure he’s dead before giving up on him.”

She props herself up on one elbow, her face flaming. “God, what is it to you, anyway? Odds are he’s dead, and at this rate I’ll be joining him soon.”

Hancock lifts one hairless eyebrow. “You’re right. It’s no skin off my ass,” he replies calmly, despite the disapproval rolling off him in waves. He butts his smoke in the ashtray, then lights himself another. “Y’know what I first noticed about you, though? Not that scar you hate so much. Not even that face of yours, right off one of those pre-war billboards. Nah, it was that look in your eye. Thought to myself, ‘Now here’s a woman on a mission, and God help anyone who stands in her way.’ Liked that about you.”

A puff of smoke blows out the hole in the middle of his face. “But now you sound just like every other bit of flotsam that ever drifted through these gates. You’re lost, Liz.”

Now she bristles at the nickname. His words send anger flaring through her veins, more potent than any chems he could’ve given her, and her vision burns red at the edges. Before she even knows it, she’s sitting up in bed, too angry to care about the sheet dropping soundlessly to bare her breasts. “Are you kidding me right now? You killed a man in cold blood right in front of me the first time we met, and now you’re lecturing me?”

He snorts, a mirthless sound. “Listen, you wanna let off some steam, I’m your man. You need resources, happy to provide. But you’re fucking up now, sister.”

Lizzy’s heard enough. She slips out of bed, and starts pulling her clothes on. “Okay, Mister ‘got high and turned myself into a ghoul’, I don’t think I have any advice to take from you.”

“Trust me, I know something of runnin’, and that’s a hell of a lot what it looks like right now.”

Those strange black eyes could pin her into place. Not a trace of humour in them now, but still no anger either, just two pieces of burned out coal she viciously wants to ignite again. She pulls her boots on, not bothering with the laces; then she grabs her Pip-Boy off the coffee table, her laser pistol, and a Jet inhaler, just to spite him, but all that accomplishes is adding an unimpressed furrow to the ridges already creasing his brow.

“Go fuck yourself, Hancock,” she says in one last attempt at riling him up, then slams the door of his room behind her.

He doesn’t come after her, of course, doesn’t even call out for her, and she can’t tell whether she’s disappointed or relieved. The watchmen on duty give her a wide berth as she sprints down the spiral staircase two steps at a time, shoves the door open and stumbles into the violent sunlight and the wasteland’s omnipresent stench of dust and decay.

She should leave, Lizzy knows. Goodneighbour _belongs_ to Hancock. She should leave the town altogether and never step through its gates again, leave him to miss forever whatever he liked about her: her ass, her face, whatever look is burning in her eyes right now. But where would she even go? No point going to Diamond City to meet Bobbi No-Nose now that Lizzy doesn’t need those caps anymore. No way in hell she’s going to Sanctuary either, to live amidst the bones of her previous life. This world doesn’t want her. This world has no place for her, and it reminds her at every turn.

Flotsam. So she drifts, floating down the streets till the Scollay Square sign appears at the turn of a street corner, the rust a dull copper in the sun. Underneath, the red-tinted light bulbs of the Memory Den are losing the fight against the blinding afternoon.

Lizzy storms into the building, and waits for her eyes to get used to the dim interior. The burgundy of the velvet hangings becomes distinct from the damask pattern peeling off the walls, and the rows of memory pods emerge from the dark, the clear plastic domes suffused by the tube lights humming in the silence. Maybe Kent Connolly has the right of it. Pick one nice memory, one day that wasn’t just ashes and _shit_ , and relive it over and over again: that first kiss at the drive-in, that perfect afternoon ice-skating at the Common, the first time Shaun was laid in her arms, his tiny red face wailing from within its fleece bundle.

But it’s not any of those memories she revisits. She slips back through time, and returns everything the way it should be. She leaves the Third Rail before Hancock gets to tempt her with his chems and his sweet words, never even walks into Goodneighbour in the first place, retraces her steps along the ruined streets of Boston and back into Concord. The blood leaches back into the cut on her face, and the raider’s knife sears the flesh closed again. In Vault 111, Shaun is returned to Nate’s arms, and the hole on the chest of his cobalt suit resorbs into nothing.

All that death and ruin furl back into their seeds, and the bombs drop back into that clear autumn sky, vanishing like stars in sunlight.

And then she’s back home.

The first thing she notices are the sounds. The silent deadness that’s claimed the Commonwealth has now been replaced by the trills and chirps of birds, the squeals of children playing in a backyard somewhere, the purring nuclear-powered engines of the running cars. The stench is gone, too, and she breathes in that clean, sprightly fall scent that doesn’t exist anywhere anymore except in her memories, takes in the dazzling sight of the manicured trees lining the streets of the neighbourhood, a welter of orange, scarlet and gold. Even the grass is a marvel to behold, and she simply watches its gentle green ripples in the breeze, till a voice she thought forgotten reaches her ears.

“The big _kaboom_ ,” the Vault-Tec sales rep is saying from her porch, gesturing for emphasis. “It’s inevitable, I’m afraid, and coming sooner than you may think.”

She hears herself laugh from the doorway. “Now, now, have a little faith,” she replies, her mouth set in a smile that would’ve looked genuine to anyone else. “I’m sure our forces are on top of the communist threat.”

“Well, one would certainly _hope_ so, ma’am, but are you willing to bet your family’s future on it?” A nervous laugh softens the edge of his words, then he clears his throat. “I’m here today to tell you that thanks to Mass Fusion’s contribution to the military effort, the Oslows have been selected for entrance into the local vault. Vault 111,” he announces, splayed hands moving through the air as if the name was lit up on a billboard.

She doesn’t remember him sounding so nervous, but the instant he strays from his script, he’s all stutters and shifty eyes. What did he know the rest of the world didn’t? The other Lizzy doesn’t notice, though. She signs the paperwork like it was an autograph, thanks him, then sits back on the couch, her legs tucked under herself. Inside, Codsworth is busying himself at the stove. The bracing smell of coffee floats in the air, commingled with the dulcet airs of her Billie Holiday holotape. For a moment she watches herself turn the glossy pages of her La Coiffe magazine and take dainty sips from her mug, a perfect lipstick mark on the rim.

“Enjoy the last coffee of your life,” she says out loud, but the other Lizzy simply hums along to _Crazy He Calls Me_ , oblivious.

No scar, of course, but that’s really the least of her transformation. Her hair is fuller, done in chestnut victory rolls, the planes and dips of her rosy face nowhere near as stark as they are now, and that look of determination Hancock claimed to love so much is nowhere to be found.

“Who was it, hon?”

A pang pierces through her, enough to cut the breath out of her throat. Nate is standing in the doorway of the living room, their baby son in his arms. Her heart drops. Even the Memory Den doesn’t do them justice: they’re both so beautiful in the light streaming through the treetops in the yard, Shaun babbling happily against Nate’s defined shoulder, a row of small brown moles visible right under the sleeve of his t-shirt.

The other Lizzy doesn’t even raise her eyes from the magazine. “Oh, just some guy from Vault-Tec, I think it was? Underground accommodations in case of nuclear strikes. Better not be a scam,” she adds, shaking one indignant fingernail in the air.

“Nah, Karl mentioned they’d be coming over. It’s peace of mind, right?” Nate nuzzles the swirl of dark hair on the crown of Shaun’s head. “Nothing too extravagant for my little boy and the woman of my life.”

His rich, warm laughter joins Shaun’s warbling noises, matching brown eyes crinkled with mirth. She wants to yell at herself to look at them, look at her husband and her son before time runs out, but the other Lizzy keeps studying her magazine with rapt attention. It’s maddening, seeing herself like this, poring over something as useless as hairstyles minutes before the end of the world, and Lizzy can’t help the red flare of anger rising through her.

Without thinking, she grabs at the magazine—she expects her hand to slip incorporeal through the pages, but it closes around the smooth, shiny paper, and the magazine flies across the living room to land near the kitchen island with a rustling noise.

No one reacts. No one notices, not even the other Lizzy, who, ludicrously, keeps flipping through invisible pages like an automaton.

“Look at them,” Lizzy snarls at herself, to no avail. She fists one hand into the carefully pinned rolls of hair and gives them a sharp tug, twisting her neck towards Nate and Shaun. “Look at them, you stupid bitch.”

Still nothing. A hot, bitter surge of anger burns through her, and something snaps inside her like a bone. She lets go of the other Lizzy’s hair to grab the mug of coffee instead, and with a strangled shout, throws it with all the strength she can muster. An arc of dark, steaming liquid patters to the carpet, and the kitchen window explodes in a shower of glass when the mug hits the panes. The noise is cathartic, but nowhere near enough. A kick turns the coffee table over; the ashtray and flower vase spill, scattering cigarette butts and petals and shards of ceramic on the carpet. Billie Holiday’s crooning comes to an abrupt stop when she tears the holotape player off the wall socket and drops it to the floor. She rips the curtains off the rod, sweeps the books and picture frames off their shelves, opens the mini bar and tosses bottles at the opposite wall.

No one pays her any mind, like a child throwing a tantrum. Codsworth gives her a wide berth, ignoring the piles of dishes that crashed to the floor tiles. “Two eggs, sir?” the robot asks with his usual cheer, placing a frying pan on the stove. “Sunny side up as usual?”

“You got it,” Nate replies.

The other Lizzy is still flipping through her invisible magazine and sipping on her nonexistent coffee. “Just toast for me, please,” she tells Codsworth in falsely bright tones. “I can’t seem to shed those last few pounds of baby weight.”

God, Lizzy could scream at the sound of her voice. She sounds perfectly vapid, a pull-string doll made to talk on cue.

 _That’s a pretty face, doll_ , the raider says again, some two hundred years in the future.

Her heartbeat pounds deep inside her. Without thinking, she grips one of the handles protruding from the knife stand and pulls it out with a soft hiss. In her mind’s eye, she sees Nate’s corpse slumped in the seat of his cryo-pod, his bluish skin rimed with a thin lattice of frost, that deceptively small hole in the front of his vault suit; Shaun’s wails fading down the hallway, while the man with the scar peers through the tempered glass, his flinty gaze like ice in the middle of his weathered face. The blade catches a beam of sunlight as she lifts the knife, her hand remarkably steady.

It slices through the skin startlingly easily. Red, red blood gushes out of the fresh wound to stream down the other Lizzy’s face. The colour is a perfect match to her lipstick and the cherry pattern on her dress; it screams against her pale, unblemished complexion, and the sight arouses something primal inside her, some sort of bloodlust she must’ve brought back from the post-apocalyptic future. Her vision curdles red at the edges, and her fingers are clenched so hard around the handle it hurts. The blade glances once against the bridge of her nose, but she keeps slashing at that face out of time, draws the blade across her brow, her chin, her lips, stabs it through the meat of her cheek and jabs it at her teeth.

The other Lizzy’s eyes find hers, very green amidst the mess of bloody, carved out flesh that remains of her face. Scarlet drops fall off her lashes, and gobs of blood dribble from her mouth, but there’s no pain anywhere in her expression, nothing except incommensurable sadness.

It’s just the two of them in the living room now, the future reaching back into a past that’s now ashes and fallout. It’s just as disconcerting as it was the other way around, when she was thawed out from her centuries-long sleep to find everything and everyone she knew dead and gone.

Dead. That Lizzy is dead, just like everyone else.

 _You’re lost, Liz_ , she hears Hancock say again, and now, caught between two worlds that have no place for her, she knows he was right.

The knife drops to the shards of glass at her feet, and Lizzy starts to cry.

She cries for a long time, arms wrapped tight around herself, her body barely able to contain the extent of her grief. She cries for her beautiful house, her beautiful husband, her beautiful face; for her parents, her friends, the neighbours she greeted every morning, for every life cut short in the span of an instant, and every life unnaturally prolonged by the same. She cries for all the lost beauty in the world, every hope, every cherished dream scattered like sand in the blast. For Nate. For Andy. For Kent.

For her baby, alone somewhere in that ruined world.

Strong arms embrace her from behind. Nate’s familiar warmth envelops her, together with the clean, comforting scent of his cologne. She clings to his arms, and cries while he holds her, pressing gentle kisses to her hair. “Hon,” he whispers into her ear. “I’m so sorry.”

Now that the world has ended, and that Nate’s gone with it, all his crimes seem so benign. What she wouldn’t give to have him back at her side, to be annoyed again by all his harmless habits. She swipes at her face with the back of her hand. “For which thing?” she chokes out with a strangled, mirthless laugh.

His hands move to her shoulders, and he gently turns her around so that she faces him. The shards of glass at their feet crack under her weight, filling the silence that now blankets the house. He cups her face in his hands, and wipes her cheeks with his thumbs. “For taking you for granted,” he answers. “I thought we had all the time in the world, and instead I let every day pass us by.”

Her gaze moves up to his face, that handsome face she knows so well. She can still see the round-cheeked kid from the photo albums, the gangly teenager she fell in love with, the man she told _yes_ and _I do_ , and who’d go on to become the father of her child.

But she’ll never get to see him grow old, never get to see who he might have yet become. Time has left him crystallized somewhere far behind, and the current has swept her away, some two hundred years in the future.

Lizzy sobs. “Oh, Nate. It’s so _unfair_. I should’ve died with you. I wish I’d died with you.”

“No, you don’t.”

She shakes her head, fresh tears rolling down her cheeks. Nate wipes them off, patiently. “I can’t do this. I’m so _scared_.”

“You can, Liz. You’re stronger than you think.”

His large hand wraps around hers, and he leads her away from the destruction wrought by her outburst. Lizzy follows him down the hallway, swaying like she was drunk. Their pictures of Cape Cod are still hanging on the wall, just as she remembers: the lighthouse, the wooden walkways running through the dunes, the pale strip of beach tucked between a stormy, slate sea and golden tufts of grass. She remembers late mornings wiled away in bed, the salt air blowing her hair around her face and sticking to her lipstick, Nate’s hands wandering under the restaurant table during dinner.

The sight of their bedroom is jarring. She remembers too well how the centuries have left it, destroyed by the blast and exposed to the elements, but now it’s all in warm creamy light and fluttering curtains. She swallows once, hard, and enters Shaun’s nursery instead. The mobile spins above the empty crib, a stream of music whirling in the air with the spinning space shuttles.

“You know what I always liked about you?” Nate says, watching her from the doorway as she picks one of the framed pictures on the shelf. “Your fearlessness. Always the first to volunteer, always the first to speak up, always making sure no one was left out.”

The corners of Lizzy’s mouth twitch. “I just liked the attention.”

Nate moves behind her as she runs one finger over their faces smiling over a sleeping, bundled Shaun. “Maybe, but it meant something to the rest of us. Remember Jake Nomura?”

It takes her a moment to match the name to a face. Cropped black hair, thin wire-frame glasses, shuffling gait. “In the school band. Yeah.”

“You chewed us out for picking on him because … well, because we were too stupid to realize he _wasn’t_ Chinese,” he finishes with a chuckle, visibly embarrassed. “‘Learn the difference,’ you said.”

Lizzy snorts as she puts the picture back in place. “I don’t remember that at all.”

“Poor kid was in love with you till we graduated. Well, so were most of us. Thought I’d ruined my chances with you,” Nate says, running a nervous hand through his hair. He looks every bit the high school student again, with that easy smile and awkward, offhand charm. “Couldn’t believe my luck when you said yes, and then I just … I got so caught up in the day-to-day I neglected you.”

Heat rushes to her eyes. “It wasn’t just you, Nate,” she says, trying to blink the tears away. “I was always being so difficult, and for no reason. You deserved better.”

Nate grins despite the sorrow in his brown eyes. “You’re kidding, right? I didn’t deserve _you_ ,” he answers, slipping one hand through the curls falling over her shoulder. “I’d try to make it up to you if I wasn’t dead, but looks like I’ll have to settle for haunting the next bastard who doesn’t treat you right. I only wish we could’ve had the chance to make things right.”

Lizzy closes her eyes to better commit his touch to memory, and two tears roll down her cheeks. “I still can,” she says. Standing in that small room, all in bright colours and patterns, she knows what she has to do. “I’ll find Shaun. I’ll find our baby.”

“I know you will,” Nate whispers.

He tilts his mouth to hers, eyelids sliding shut. Lizzy fists one hand into the hem of his t-shirt, and Nate snakes his arm around her waist to pull her closer. This is goodbye; this kiss is their farewell, slow and heavy with what-ifs and could-have-beens, a lifetime of possibilities extinguished. It feels like it wasn’t so long ago when they were still kids, kissing poolside or on the bleachers, cold noses bumping together in winter, drunken laughter spilling the upturned corners of their mouths. None of that giddy rush now. A strange gift, to kiss him one last time, knowing it’s the last. Everything she wishes she could have told him goes into the slow-moving seam of their lips, sealing their mouths together like cauterizing a wound.

Outside the window, the faraway blare of a siren rends the clean autumn air. Their mouths part after one last reluctant moment. “It’s time,” Nate says in the warm space between their lips, pressing his forehead to hers.

Lizzy opens her eyes into his and tries to commit them to memory: the dark, full lashes, the crow’s feet just starting to crease the corners, the tiny specks of gold that shine in the light. No words could possibly fill the hollow left by their impending farewell, so she stays quiet, takes in Shaun’s nursery one last time, then lets her fingers slide out of Nate’s loose hold.

The toneless wail of the siren drops low, then back again. A brisk wind is blowing, dry leaves rustling on the pavement as they sweep past her. Lizzy wraps her arms around herself as she walks away from her house, away from Vault 111, down the empty streets to the Old North Bridge spanning the Charles river. She stops in the middle of the wooden bridge and looks over at the horizon: the deserted streets thinning as they stretch farther away, the furry treetops over the buttery clouds, the wires arcing between pylons.

She opens the fist she keeps cradled to her heart, and stretches her hand out. Her and Nate’s wedding rings rest side by side in her palm, the gold glinting in the sunlight. Her breath hitches in her throat. She remembers all too well tearing it off his frozen finger, her hands shaking from the cold and panic filling her chest.

A flash of white.

It’s bright enough to render her blind, but still she sees, somehow, whether it’s her imagination or memories at play. A fireball flares straight into the sky and swells into a mushroom shape, stripping the clouds of their pale, warm colours. The shockwave rushes towards her with a deafening roar, bending the trees and pylons in its way. The water of the river boils away, hissing gouts of steam rising towards her, till the blast tears the wood of the bridge to splinters before slamming through her. It scours the inside of her skull, boils her blood and burns the flesh off her skeleton, vaporizes the wedding bands to gold dust in her hand and embeds it deep into the bleached bone that covers her heart.

* * *

“Hey,” a familiar voice says. “You okay?”

A moist snout sniffs and noses at her face; Dogmeat lets out a soft whine, and Lizzy’s fingers slip through thick fur. It takes her a few tries to keep her eyelids lifted long enough for the blur in front of her to resolve into a face. Dark eyes under the wide brim of his hat, a wedge of grey morning light bringing the scar running down his cheek in sheer relief.

Preston, bent over her, his brow creased with concern.

Dogmeat gives her hand an affectionate lick, and his tail starts wagging when she stirs awake. Lizzy stretches her legs out in front of her and winces, keenly aware of the old wood of the bridge railing digging into her shoulder blades.

Back to Sanctuary Hills, all in cold light and dead, emaciated trees. The river running under the Old North Bridge is more debris than water now, and her ghosts have left the neighbourhood again, nothing but ruins and memories in their wake.

Preston heaves a sigh of relief. “Everything okay? Got some first aid supplies back at Sanctuary if you need them.”

She shakes her head and immediately regrets it. “Just the worst hangover ever,” she answers, rubbing the grit out of her eyes.

After a second of hesitation, he sits down next to her on the old bridge. “Dogmeat found you,” he says, patting the dog’s head.

Dogmeat lifts his head from her knee at that, tail wagging. “ _Woof_ ,” he confirms.

Lizzy smiles. “Good boy,” she says, scratching him behind the ears.

Preston reaches to rub Dogmeat’s snout. “I gotta admit, I didn’t expect to see you again after you left,” he says after a moment, obviously choosing his words with care. “What happened?”

The air in Sanctuary is clear—or as clear as it gets on this side of the apocalypse—and the place seems almost obscenely open after Goodneighbour’s cramped streets. Not a sound, not a movement except a half-hearted wind swaying the bare branches and a low trickle of voices from the estate. Not a change from since she was last here a few days ago, unwilling to listen to anything Preston had to say about the Minutemen and raiders and whatnot.

After Goodneighbour’s neon-lit blur, though, it feels like another two centuries have passed by since.

“I have a job lined up to get a few more caps to my name,” she answers, keeping things vague. She doesn’t tell Preston about Bobbi No-Nose’s heist, or _where_ she got the job in question, or about Hancock for that matter. “I’m looking to hire this detective to help me find Shaun.”

Preston nods. “Why come back to Sanctuary then?”

From anyone else, it’d have sounded accusatory. From Preston, though, she only gets genuine concern, tinged with curiosity.

Lizzy looks down at the band of bare, pale skin around her ring finger. “There’s something I wanted to do here first,” she says, and can’t help the haze that comes over her voice. “I want to bury the people of Vault 111.”

She does not say _my husband_. Doesn’t need to. The trees waver and warp before her, thin branches stretching high into the blushing light of dawn. She tries not to think about Nate, his brown eyes staring unseeing at the floor grating of the vault; instead she thinks about him in his tight jeans and varsity jacket, dark hair slicked back and a dimpled smile on his young, handsome face.

“We’ll help you with that,” Preston says, and the pinks and lavenders of the rising sun blur into a pastel swirl before her eyes. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“And I for yours.”

Preston slips a tentative arm around her shoulders. Lizzy lets her head drop against him, and the two of them watch the sunrise in silence, mourning their dead.

* * *

“Well, well, well,” Hancock says by way of greeting, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest. “If it ain’t Bobbi’s little patsy.”

He’s waiting for her, which Lizzy has gathered is never a good sign in this town. She drags her feet up the last few creaking steps of the Old State House’s spiraling staircase. “I’m sorry,” she says, and ventures a glance at his face, but the dark pools of his eyes are unfathomable under the point of his tricorn. “I knew there was something fishy about her, but I needed the caps so I didn’t ask.”

“To be fair, that’s usually considered a good thing ‘round these parts,” Hancock replies, still sounding amused. She knows better than taking it to mean she’s off the hook, though. “Thought you were tryin’ to get back at me, considering we didn’t part on the best of terms.” To say the least. Hancock considers her, rubbing a hand over his chin. “Mister ‘got high and turned myself into a ghoul’, huh? Got a good chuckle out of that one.”

Lizzy cringes, wishing she could crawl into a dumpster and die. God, did she really say that? “You were right,” she admits, shuffling on her feet. “About Shaun, and … everything. I was scared, and I took it out on you. I’m sorry.”

She hands him the plastic pump she grabbed as she stormed out of his room last time, a meagre olive branch. That only gets a laugh out of him. “Nah, keep it. You look like you need it more than I do,” he replies, and something in his stance shifts. “You know, no one talks to me like that anymore. Kinda hot, if I’m honest. Those couple of days you spent in Goodneighbour were the most fun I’d had in a long while.”

She blinks up at him, her brain racing to catch up. “What?”

He shrugs, raises his hands palms up, then drops them back to his sides. “I pushed you too hard. Got so used to ordering other people around I didn’t even think to go out there myself. And now Bobbi …” He makes a displeased noise and hangs his head at that. “Let me tell ya, this classy little tricorner hat of mine is getting heavy.”

For the life of her, she can’t figure out where he’s going with any of this. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying let’s find your kid. We’ll get you some real firepower—none of that laser crap—and I’ll show you how to use it. _Really_ use it. You won’t have anything to worry about with me covering ya.”

Her jaw nearly hits the floorboards of the Old State House. “You’d leave Goodneighbour? For me?” she blurts out.

A lopsided grin slants his mouth. “I mean, yeah, you’re reason enough. But I need out of these walls for a bit, get a grip on what really matters. So if you want a devilishly handsome ghoul to watch your back, offer’s on the table.”

Lizzy grins despite herself. “My back, huh?”

“Front’s great to look at, too, don’t get me wrong.”

“So we’re good?”

“Yeah, we’re good. Just wanted to make you squirm a bit,” he says, and the curve of his mouth sends a pulse of warmth in her belly. “Earned that, yeah?”

She takes the last few steps still separating them, and aims a coy, flirtatious smile at him. “I can think of another way or two for you to make me squirm, if you wanted to keep going,” she says, trailing one teasing finger down the collar of his shirt.

Hancock wraps one arm around her waist and pulls her close, their breaths mingling in the increasingly smaller space between their mouths. “Oh, we’re gonna have fun, you and me.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so, so much for reading! <3 I’m not the most prolific writer and my Dragon Age WIP is taking up quite a lot of my time, but I do have plans to write more for these two! If you enjoyed this fic, I suggest subscribing to the series to get notified whenever I update it. :)
> 
> Do you like playlists? I like playlists! I have one for [Hancock](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/60pmswy87oHEAT3suu42dE?si=eJqW_qu-QRCVyt_SIXw8mA), one for [Lizzy](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5a04IqFOY5NkxwWep2zZLW?si=hUJKlA3ITT-p4ZnXXS_3mA), and a [shippy one](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6zvt70MVN2daCxTIevAoWW?si=blrUp0dbTLiEkChM0JFE4A).
> 
> Kudos and comments always welcome and appreciated! Come say hello on [Tumblr](https://asaara-writes.tumblr.com)! <3


End file.
